Last Days of the San José

Liz Lambert left her job as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in 1994 and returned to her native Texas to work in the Attorney General’s office in Austin. She used to hang out at the Continental Club on South Congress Avenue with her friend (club owner) Steve Wertheimer and fantasize about the rundown old 1930’s hotel across the street. In those days, South Congress was a bad part of town and the hotel was a haven of drugs, crime and cyclical poverty. In a stroke of luck or destiny, Liz approached the owners on a whim to find out they had just put the property up for sale. She bought the hotel thinking she’d renovate it one room at a time, but reality set in and she ended up running the hotel in its existing state as a low rent residential hotel for several years while she worked on funding to renovate. In the course of chronicling her experiences with the residents of the hotel on video camera, she ended up making a documentary called Last Days of the San Jose that casts an interesting light on human relationships in gentrification and urban renewal.